Not Enough Latex Gloves?

By Gwynne Dyer

IT IS the duty of all public officials to "do something" whenever a new threat appears, even if there is nothing sensible to be done. If they don't make a show of solving the problem, the media will punish them severely. So we have had a vigorous U.S. government response to the recent apprehension of the Underpants Bomber.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was from Nigeria, and he was Muslim. Therefore, Washington has announced that all travelers to the United States from Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Yemen and seven other Muslim or partly Muslim countries will face extra checks at airport security. They will be patted down by hand, and their carry-on bags will also be searched by hand. So that's all fixed, then. No more exploding underpants.

Except that Abdulmutallab's underpants were on his body, so hand searches of cabin baggage aren't going to help much. Moreover, it is far from certain that a physical pat-down of Abdulmutallab would have detected the guilty underpants.

Then there are the curious additions and omissions in the list of countries affected. Cuba is included, but Britain, France and the Netherlands are not, although Britain was the home of Richard Reid, the unsuccessful Shoe Bomber, and Abdulmutallab passed through Dutch airport security on his way to Detroit. Why are these countries exempt?

This is starting to sound like a rant, but I'm not actually demanding more stringent security measures. I am arguing in favor of less "security" at the airport, and a lot more emphasis on real security work before the would-be bombers check in.

With the sole exceptions of Richard Reid and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, all the plots to blow up airliners bound for the United States since 9/11 have been thwarted by the intelligence services, not by the hundreds of thousands of poorly paid "security" personnel who staff the gates at the airports. And they didn't catch either Reid or Abdulmutallab. What conclusions should we draw from that?

We should conclude that further "enhancements" to airport security are a total waste of time and money, although basic security that stops people from smuggling guns and knives aboard aircraft should be maintained. Don't reward the politicians for submitting to the idiotic measures that the media demand of them. Accept that nothing is perfect, and remember that you are still 50 times more likely to die in a car crash than in an aircraft crash. The alternative is to try to close every loophole—and the obvious hole in airport security today is the fact that they do not check for anal bombs.

The first suicide bomber with an explosive device in his rectum has already struck, although not on an aircraft. Four months ago, an al-Qaeda-linked militant passed through all the security checks and blew himself up during an audience with Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia's deputy interior minister.

If Abdulmutallab had boarded the Detroit-bound aircraft with the explosive device inside his body rather than sewn into his underpants, how were the security staff going to find it? Only by the time-tested method that prison guards regularly use: the "body cavity search."

This could obviously be done at airports too. Just bend over, please, sir or madam. Yet nobody has proposed putting this policy into effect, and that is not because they are worried about a shortage of latex gloves. The whole airport security mania is largely symbolic, and body cavity searches would upset far more people than they would reassure—so in this case, common sense trumps "security." It should do so in many other cases too.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.